Are People Reading What You Write?
A Quick Formula to Burnish Your Prose
September 2006 By Denny Hatch
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In the News
Rupe looks to release birdMurdoch considering DirecTV sale to Liberty
In a splattering blow to the satellite biz, Rupert Murdoch supposedly dubbed DirecTV a “turd bird” and is considering selling News Corp.’s controlling stake to Liberty Media.
—Jill Goldsmith, Variety, Sept. 15, 2006
A good headline and lead will get a reader into a story or a memo, e-mail, white paper, book, story, report, blog or letter.
The problem most of us have is losing the reader along the way.
I’m delighted to welcome an old friend and long-time colleague, Bob Scott, as a guest columnist. Since the 1950s, Bob has been using Robert Gunning’s formula for helping writers make their prose clearer, more coherent and comprehensible.
This is a piece you may well want to download and file for future reference and pass on to your friends and associates—no matter what business they’re in.
Measuring the Readability of Copy
By Robert Scott
You’ve spent long hours at your computer. Your eyeballs ache, your fingers hurt. You’ve put together an important piece for someone who wants it yesterday. You’re sure the copy is good—the various elements read well. Unfortunately, you can’t afford the luxury of letting the piece marinate by putting it aside for a day or two for leisurely review and touch-up revision. In the early days, computers sported a so-called readability feature, and software like RightWriter and Grammatik existed to measure readability. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to check your copy immediately for readability? To have some way of making sure it is aimed at the intended audience? A completely portable yardstick for measuring reading ease?
Wait a minute! There is just such a formula: Robert Gunning’s largely forgotten “Fog Index.” It’s an easy-to-remember way of determining readability. In 1944, Gunning, a 36-year-old Ohio editor, quit his job and started a consulting business still not listed in the government’s index of occupations. The specialty of Robert Gunning Associates was counseling in clear writing—showing businesses how they could improve the readability of their communications.
Gunning’s clients included large corporations like the Standard Oil Co. and General Motors, United Press International, and newspapers such as the Louisville Courier-Journal, Hartford Courant, Washington Star, and Wall Street Journal, whose legendary editor, Bernard Kilgore, became a disciple.
Gunning preached what most writers had long known—that certain factors played a part in readability: first and foremost, average sentence length in words, with the proportion of simple sentences, strong verb forms, familiar words, abstract words, long words and personal references all playing strong supporting roles.
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* Users of Robert Gunning’s Fog Index should recognize two things: First, reading ease isn’t only the ease of understanding words, phrases and sentences. There’s also the problem of how sentences relate to one another in a paragraph and how the paragraphs themselves relate. Any measure of word- or sentence-difficulty certainly correlates with overall reading difficulty, but it’s no exaggeration to say that there are writers who use simple words and write short sentences, yet whose copy isn’t a pleasure to read.* The Fog Index really is related to comprehensibility. It’s not necessarily about genuine readability—the property of copy that makes a reader want to keep on reading. Making something easier to read doesn’t always make it more interesting or more desirable to read. Using shorter sentences and simpler words indeed does yield copy comprehensible to a wider audience, but an increase in comprehensibility will not of itself make for greater readability.
* It’s easy enough for writers to raise the comprehensibility of their copy by training themselves to write in short bursts and to choose less complicated words. Writing truly readable copy is quite another matter and less easily learned—you must cultivate an ear for the rhythms of the rich language that is English. Effective copy is not only clear and reads easily, but it also will sound right. In editing your copy (and it’s rare copy indeed that cannot be made better with one more revision), you should read not only for sense, but for euphony—the agreeableness of what you’ve written and its pleasurable effect on the ear (and thus on the eye). In short, try listening to your copy, even going so far as playing it back to yourself on a tape recorder.
* A good writer takes the problem of writing seriously and attempts to marry comprehensibility and readability. It’s not easy to develop and maintain the skill of simple writing while at the same time keeping an ear open for the aptness of phrase and sentence. Only then will you succeed at the art that none of us will ever fully master—using the tools and the building blocks in the storehouse of language to create a deceptively simple structure of complex thoughts and emotions to entice readers and move them to action. The paradox is, of course, that if the simplicity is obvious, you’ve failed.
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
A to Z of Alternative Wordshttp://www.plainenglish.co.uk/atoz.pdf
Robert Scott’s Blog, Postscripts
http://www.notorc.com
Companies Mentioned:
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